Making the Google Developers Documentation Style Guide Public

Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog

You can now use our developer-documentation style guide for open source documentation projects.

For some years now, our technical writers at Google have used an internal-only editorial style guide for most of our developer documentation. In order to better support external contributors to our open source projects, such as Kubernetes, AMP, or Dart, and to allow for more consistency across developer documentation, we're now making that style guide public.

If you contribute documentation to projects like those, you now have direct access to useful guidance about voice, tone, word choice, and other style considerations. It can be useful for general issues, like reminders to use second person, present tense, active voice, and the serial comma; it can also be great for checking very specific issues, like whether to write "app" or "application" when you want to be consistent with the Google Developers style.

The style guide is a reference document, so instead of reading through it in linear order, you can use it to look things up as needed. For matters of punctuation, grammar, and formatting, you can do a search-in-page to find items like "Commas," "Lists," and "Link text" in the left nav. For specific terms and phrases, you can look at the word list.

Keep an eye on the guide's release notes page for updates and developments, and send us your comments and suggestions via the Send Feedback link on each page of the guide—we want to hear from you as we continue to evolve the style guide.

Posted by Jed Hartman, Technical Writer

Google Summer of Code 2017 Student Curtain Call

Back in early May we announced the students accepted into the 13th edition of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program, our largest program ever! Today we are pleased to announce the 1,128 (86.2%*) students from 68 countries that successfully completed the 2017 GSoC. Great job, students!

Students worked diligently with 201 open source organizations and over 1,600 mentors to learn to work with internationally distributed online teams, write great code and help their mentoring org enhance, extend and refine their codebases. Students have also become an important part of these communities. We feel strongly that to keep open source organizations thriving and evolving, they need new ideas - GSoC students help to bring fresh perspectives to these important projects.

We look forward to seeing even more from the 2017 students. Many will go on to become GSoC mentors in future programs and many more will become committers to these and other open source organizations. Some may even create their own open source projects! These students have a bright future ahead of them in technology and open source.

Interested in what the students worked on this summer? Check out their work as well as statistics on past programs.

A big thank you to our mentors and organization administrators who make this program possible. Their dedication to welcoming new student contributors into their communities and teaching them the fundamentals of open source is awesome and inspiring. Thank you all!

Congratulations to all of the GSoC 2017 students and the mentors who made this our biggest and best Google Summer of Code yet.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

* 1,309 students started the coding period on May 30th, stats are based upon that number.

The Mentors of Google Summer of Code 2017

Mentors are the bread and butter of our program - without their hard work and dedication, there would be no Google Summer of Code (GSoC). These volunteers spend 12 weeks (plus a month of community bonding) tirelessly guiding their students to create the best quality project possible and welcoming them into their communities - answering questions and providing help at all hours.

Each year we pore over oodles of data to extract the most interesting and relevant statistics about the GSoC mentors. Here’s a quick snapshot of our 2017 group:

• Total mentors: 3,439
• Mentors assigned to an active project: 1,647
• Mentors who have participated in GSoC over 10 years: 22
• Percentage of new mentors: 49%

GSoC 2017 mentors are a worldly group, hailing from 69 countries on 6 continents - we’re still waiting on a mentor from Antarctica… Anyone?

Interested in the data? Check out the full list of countries.

Some interesting factoids about our mentors:

• Average age: 39
• Youngest: 15*
• Oldest: 68
• Most common first name: Michael (there are 40!)

GSoC mentors help to introduce the next generation to the world of open source software development — for that we are very grateful. To show our appreciation, we invite two mentors from each of the 201 participating organizations to attend the annual mentor summit at the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California. It’s three days of food, community building, lively debate and lots of fun.

Thank you to everyone involved in Google Summer of Code. Cheers to yet another great year!

By Mary Radomile, Google Open Source

* Say what? 15 years old!? Yep! We had 12 GSoC mentors under the age of 18. This group of enthusiastic teens started their journey in our sister program, Google Code-in, an open source coding competition for 13-17 year olds. You can read more about it at g.co/gci.